e Gerhardt family took a
hand in getting them settled, bringing little gifts--crocheted mats,
bouquets of artificial flowers, and two pictures, bright-coloured
chromos of "Morning" and "Night," representing two little children,
awake and asleep. Mrs. Osbourne loyally kept these pictures for years,
hanging them upon her wall in tender and grateful memory of the
Gerhardts.

After three months' stay in Antwerp, finding it to be a difficult
place for women to study art, and having been told of a good and cheap
school in Paris, she decided to go there. When they parted, with many
tears, from their dear Belgian friends, Mrs. Osbourne, with a swelling
heart, tried to thank Papa Gerhardt for his kindness to her and her
children, but he said he had a large family who would some day have to
go out into the world, and he had treated the Americans as he hoped
his own would be treated.

From Antwerp they went to Paris, and Fanny and her daughter entered
the Julien School of Art on the Passage des Panorama, where they spent
a very busy time working at their drawings under the instruction of
Monsieur Tony Fleury. The older of the two boys, Lloyd, was placed in
a French school, and he still remembers that in any quarrel with the
boys he was called "Prussian" as a dire insult. He did not know what
it meant, but nevertheless resented it promptly.

The family lived very plainly, their meals often consisting of smoked
herring and brown bread; yet these straitened circumstances did not
prevent Mrs. Osbourne from taking pity on poor and homesick young
students, fellow countrymen, whom she met at the school, and, when
funds allowed, she invited them to eat Dutch-American dishes prepared
by her own hands.

During these Paris days a heavy sorrow fell upon the family. The
beautiful golden-haired boy, Hervey, then about five years old, fell
ill, and after lingering for some time, passed away, and was buried in
an exile's grave at St. Germain. Though the mother bore even this
heart-crushing blow with outward fortitude, the memory of it dwelt
always in an inner chamber of her heart. In a letter of sympathy
written by her years afterwards to the Graham Balfours,[5] on hearing
of the death of one of their children, she says: "My Hervey would have
been a man of forty now had he lived, and yet I am grieving and
longing for my little child as though he had just gone. Time doesn't
always heal wounds as we are told it does."

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